I grew up believing my father was the greatest man in the world. When my mom said no, he would say yes and carry me around like I was the most important thing in his life. He took me to school, and on the days he couldn’t pick me up, he always came home with biscuits. I loved watching him dote on my mother. I used to pray for a husband exactly like him.

That was before I started uncovering what was buried underneath all of it.

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It turned out that my father — this man I had built my whole idea of love around — was what people in our community called a “sperm donor.” A man who scattered himself across lives and walked away from every single one of them.

Growing up, I’d sometimes catch pieces of conversations between my mother and her friends. Things about my father, his behaviour, his ways. I never paid much attention. I told myself, well, he is a man. I thought that was just how it was. I never got to hear the full story anyway.

Until I did.

I was thirty years old when it hit me properly. My father had a fifteen year old daughter from one of his escapades. The day I found out, she was sitting at the far end of our room, close to the door, while he was having breakfast like it was any other morning. She had travelled all the way to see him because he had been playing hide and seek with her school fees. That was the father she knew — a man she had to chase down just to be seen. Meanwhile I was the daughter he showed up for every single day without being asked. When I came home that evening, nothing was said. My mother didn’t bring it up. My father pretended it never happened. And somehow, life just continued.

But I never forgot her.

Now, almost twenty years later, I find myself thinking about her again. Wondering where she is, how she turned out, whether she’s okay. Part of me wants to find her — and maybe others my father fathered along the way. But another part keeps asking whether any of this even makes sense anymore.

Twenty years is a long time. From where we come from, girls often marry young. She’s probably built her own life by now. So what happens if I show up? Will I be stirring something that was finally at rest? What if her childhood was painful because of my father’s absence — will finding me just rip that open again? And what if she resents me for being the one he chose to stay for? The one he gave the biscuits and the school runs and the big yes to. Will she look at me and see everything she was denied?

These questions keep turning over in my mind and I don’t have clean answers to any of them.

There’s also my mother to think about. Could this hurt her? And my father — what happens when he finds out I’ve been quietly unraveling what he spent decades hiding? If I do decide to go looking, where do I even start? Do I go back to my parents and ask about her family, knowing that opens a whole other conversation?

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I’m sitting with all of this. Turning it over slowly, not quite ready to put it down but not sure I’m ready to act either.

Has anyone been here before? I’d really like to know how you handled it.

— Dabem

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